Martin Luther’s interpretation of Genesis chapters 3
Martin Luther (1483-1546) was made Doctor in Biblia at Wittenberg in 1512 and remained in this
post until he died in 1546. It
was his tireless work on the Scriptures
that effected his own spiritual revolution
and then that of the entire Western church. He was a reformer, not in addition to, but because he
was a Biblical scholar and preacher.
For the last ten years of his life Luther lectured on
Genesis. These expositions
contain his most mature reflections on the nature of Scripture and of the
expositor’s task. We will look at
chapters 1-3 to get the context before concentrating on chapter 3, and in
particular verse 15.
Context – Genesis 1 and 2
Luther assumes throughout that Genesis is the work of a single
author – Moses. He is equally
happy to call the same work the teaching of the Holy Spirit.
What we have in the pages of Genesis is an historical account to
be read as literal truth. Moses’
“purpose is to teach us, not about allegorical creatures and an
allegorical world but about real creatures and a visible world
apprehended by the senses.” Not only is Moses’ primary concern the
writing of history – what he writes is a plain account of
historical fact: “Moses wrote that uneducated men might have clear
accounts of the creation.”
Creation itself occurred in six literal days around 6000 years
ago.
‘We know from Moses that the world was not in
existence before 6000 years ago. Of this it is altogether impossible to
convince a philosopher.” (LW1.3) (Ed: or, we might add, a
contemporary Christian!)
Creation is a Trinitarian activity as evidenced by the plural Elohim
taking the singular verb bara.
‘Indeed it
is the great consensus of the church that the mystery of the Trinity is
set forth here. The Father
creates heaven and earth out of nothing through the Son, whom Moses calls
the Word. Over these the Holy
Spirit broods. As a hen broods
her eggs, keeping them warm in order to hatch her chicks, and, as it
were, to bring them to life through heat, so the Scripture says that the
Holy Spirit brooded, as it were, on the waters to bring to life those
substances which were to be quickened and adorned. For it is the office of the Holy
Spirit to make alive.’ (LW1.9)
Luther makes the claim that this Triune reading is the united
teaching of the historic church.
Similarly the ‘us’ of Genesis 1:26 is plainly teaching a plurality of
Divine Persons.
‘This is a
sure indication of the Trinity, that in one divine essence there are
three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit… one and the same
God, is Author and Creator of the same work.’ (LW1.59)
This plurality and unity within the Godhead was known by the Old
Testament saints, though, Luther claims, not with the same detail as we
have in the New.
The Word of God is the creative Agent for everything Elohim
does. This ‘uncreated Word is a divine
thought, an inner command which abides in God, the same as God and yet a
distinct Person. Thus God reveals
Himself to us as the Speaker who has with Him the uncreated Word.’ As this Word is spoken, He not only
describes a state of affairs but brings them into being. “Thus the words
of God are realities, not bare words.”
The World which is thus created owes its existence to God’s
Powerful Word who is the Son of God. It is declared “very good” in that
“nothing is lacking. All things have been created in greatest abundance
for physical life.”
The LORD God’s ‘breathing’ into Adam (2:7) is a dim intimation (‘anagoge’)
of the incarnation. His words to the man in 2:16-17
establish the first church – the LORD as preacher (a role which Adam was
to assume with Eve) and the tree (or trees) of knowledge representing
both the location of worship and providing the earliest sacrament of
faith.
Yet ‘Where the Word of God is, there Satan
also makes it his business to spread falsehood and false teaching.’
Genesis 3
Initially Luther speaks of the serpent simply as ‘Satan’
yet later – in defence of literal rather than allegorical exegesis – he
maintains that the serpent is a literal serpent in whom is ‘hidden’
Satan.
Luther strongly opposes all speculation as to why Satan’s
temptation is allowed by the Divine Wisdom – this is ‘wicked curiosity’
by which we ‘sit in judgement on our God… [rather than] be judged by
Him.’ Yet
Luther notes that Scripture itself can give us clues such as Luke 22:31.
The nature of the temptation is disobedience to the Divine
Word. It is thus essentially sin
against Christ,
which thus includes and comprehends all sin. It is worth hearing Luther in full on
this issue:
“[Eve] believes the father of lies rather than
the Word of God.” (LW1.156)
“Eve is simply urged on to all sins, since she
is being urged on against the Word and the good will of God.” (LW1.146)
“Therefore Satan here attacks Adam and Eve in
this way to deprive them of the Word and to make them believe his lie
after they have lost the Word and their trust in God. Is it a wonder that when this happens,
man later on becomes proud, that he is a scorner of God and of men, that
he becomes an adulterer or a murderer?
Truly, therefore, this temptation is the sum of all temptations;
it brings with it the overthrow or the violation of the entire
Decalog. Unbelief is the source
of all sins; when Satan brought about this unbelief by driving out of
corrupting the Word, the rest was east for him.’ (LW1.147)
“Thus the root and source of sin is unbelief and turning away from
God, just as, on the other hand, the source and root of righteousness is
faith.” Three
evils come from their sin: shame at being naked;
their coverings
and their concealment.
The LORD God comes to the couple in the breeze of the day
– an appearance mediated through the ministration of angels. His dealings with the couple are
markedly different from His dealings with the serpent. This difference in treatment can, for
Luther, only be on the basis of Christ:
“This shows that even then Christ, our
Deliverer, had placed Himself between God and man as a Mediator… The
promise of Christ… is already noticeable in the thought and counsel of
God.’
This promise is spoken in verse 15 as the LORD divides the
alliance which humanity had made with the devil. Instead they are separated to the
utmost, with the Seed of the woman appearing for humanity against the devil. The Seed will be the Crusher of Satan
and the Deliverer of man – and this at great cost to Himself.
Luther is insistent that this promise – ‘the fountainhead of all
promises’ – was
believed by Adam and Eve and formed the ground of all Old Testament hope.
‘Adam and Eve were encouraged by this
promise. Wholeheartedly they
grasped the hope of their restoration; and, full of faith, they saw that
God cared about their salvation, since He clearly declares that the male
Seed of the woman would prostrate this enemy.’ (LW1.193); and
‘In the same way the faith of all people was
strengthened; from the hour in which the promise was made they waited for
the Seed and derived comfort from It against Satan.’ (LW1.193)
Eve demonstrates typical Old Testament faith in this promise in Genesis
4:1 by declaring ‘I have gotten the man (of)
the Lord.’ Though she is mistaken about the time and circumstances of the
Seed, her hopes are clearly set on His birth.
‘When Eve had given birth to her first-born
son, she hoped that she already had that Crusher (Genesis 4:1). Although she was deceived in this
hope, she saw that eventually this Seed would be born from among her
descendants, whenever it might be that He would be born. Also so far as human beings were
concerned, therefore, this promise was very clear and at the same time
very obscure.’ (LW1.193) cf 1 Peter 1:10-12
The LORD’s cursing of humanity strikes at their created roles – to
woman, child-bearing is afflicted; to man, tilling the ground is
frustrated and the battle of the sexes is begun. Yet even in Eve’s naming, Luther sees
the Gospel promise holding sway:
Here is another sign that Adam believed, and had received the Holy Spirit,
that he gives an outward indication of his trust in the coming of the
Seed. He looked to Eve as mother
of all the living – he saw through to life when everything around him was
being subjected to death. By
assigning this name to his wife he gives clear indication that the Holy
Spirit had cheered his heart through his trust in the forgiveness of sins
by the Seed of Eve.’ (LW1.220)
The LORD clothes the couple with skins, a reminder that they live
in death even while they wait for the life of the Seed. He speaks among
Himself in the plural in verse 22 – another sure expression of His Triune
life – and
decides to drive out humanity from His Presence. The cherubim are literal guardian
angels bearing a literal sword to guard the physical presence of the
actual garden up until the Flood.
Distinctive features of Luther as exhibited in this exegesis
The Foundations are Gospel
Rescuing Scripture from the legalists
Many speak
of what they term ‘salvation history’ as a progress from law to Gospel,
Luther will have none of this.
Here, at the beginning of history, the LORD sets out His way of relating
to humanity: not by law but by promise.
Not through works but by faith.
Genesis 3:15 is the pre-law Gospel. And because this is the
LORD’s ‘default’ setting for God-man relations, the Scriptures must be
understood as under-girded by Gospel.
Luther therefore refuses to identify ‘Old Testament’ with ‘Law’ as
many seem to do today. This
enables his Christological reading, as we will see.
From
Galatians 3 Luther often likes to make the point that the new covenant is
older than the old. Genesis 3:15
is a great example of this. In
it, Luther proves that sin and therefore law is abolished by the
Serpent Crusher:
‘This, therefore is the text that made Adam and Eve alive and
brought them back from death into the life which they had lost through sin…
‘If the serpent’s head is to be crushed, death must certainly be done
away with. If death is to be done
away with, that, too, which deserved death is done away with, that is,
sin. If sin is abolished, then
also the Law. And not only
this, but at the same time the obedience which was lost is renewed. Because all these benefits are
promised through this Seed, it is very clear that after the Fall our
human nature could not, by its own strength, remove sin, escape
punishment of sin and death, or recover the lost obedience. These actions call for greater power
and greater strength than human beings possess. And so the Son of God had to become a sacrifice to achieve
these things for us, to take away sin, to swallow up death, and to
restore the lost obedience. These
treasures we possess in Christ, but in hope. In this way Adam, Eve, and all who believe until the Last
Day live and conquer by that hope.’
(LW1.196-7)
The Meaning is Literal
Rescuing Scripture from the Allegorists
One of the reasons I have chosen to examine Genesis is that, in
the history of exegesis, these early chapters have often been claimed as
definitive warrant for an allegorical approach to Scripture. As far back as Philo (d. c50), it
was to early Genesis that they appealed:
“We must turn to allegory, the method dear to
men with their eyes opened.
Indeed the sacred oracles most evidently afford us the clues for
the use of this method. For they
say that in the garden (of Eden) there are trees in no way resembling
those with which we are familiar, but trees of Life, Immortality, of
Knowledge, of Apprehension, of Understanding, of the conception of good
and evil.”
.
Allegorical interpretation in the Christian tradition is largely
identified with the Alexandrians.
Exegetes like Origen (c.
185 – c. 254) would point to
features of this Genesis text – the existence of light and days before
the creation of the sun, the impossibility of four rivers co-existing in
one garden, God ‘walking about’ – and claim that such writing demands a non-literal
understanding. Clement of
Alexandria (fl. c.200) took
courage from these opening chapters in asserting that the Bible was
written in signs and symbols. The task of the exegete was therefore to
decode these signs – not to understand the letters on the page.
While Clement unravelled the signs in a five-fold interpretation,
Origen maintained a three-fold reading
and the eventual heir of this school, the quadriga, gave the
Church a four-fold sense. At best, these approaches give a
polite ‘nod’ to the literal sense of the words, but at base is the
conviction that this represents only the carnal meaning. The spiritual meaning is found
beyond the historical.
It fell therefore to the school of Antioch, remembered for its
determination to take the flesh of Christ seriously, to take the
‘flesh’ of Scripture equally seriously.
One representative, Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428), wrote Concerning
Allegory and History Against Origen and argued that the spiritual
meaning (theoria) is not the
allegorical but simply the application of the literal. Again, the interpretation of Genesis
was at the centre:
Theodore’s argument was that Origen denies ‘the
whole biblical history of its reality.
Adam was not really Adam, paradise was not really paradise, the
serpent was not a real serpent.
In that case, Theodore asks, since there are no real events, since
Adam was not really disobedient, how did death enter the world, and what
meaning does our salvation have?’
In the middle ages, Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) took up the fight for
the literal interpretation of Scripture against an allegorism that
persisted through Augustine’s (354-430) legacy. Once more, Genesis provided the battle-ground:
‘The
things which are said of Paradise [i.e. Eden] in scripture are set forth
by means of an historical narrative… [This historical narrative] must be
taken as a foundation and upon it spiritual expositions are to be built.’
Coming from this tradition of literal interpretation, Luther is
able to call allegories ‘silly’
‘twaddle’, and
‘absurd’
‘pratings’. He
insists that “it is the historical sense alone which supplies the
true and sound doctrine.”
Hence his insistence on literal 24 hour days, a literal garden
with literal rivers, a literal serpent (though dominated by a
supernatural being) and thus a literal fall from which we are promised a
literal Deliverer. Such a carnal
understanding proves not to be a denial of spiritual meaning unless we
were to conclude that the Seed Himself was too carnal to provide spiritual
hope. Yet Luther’s commitment to
the Incarnate Christ as the ground and goal of all God’s dealings with
man means he could never drive such a Platonic wedge between flesh and
spirit or between the literal and the mystical. Because the Seed Who will come
from the body of the woman is the hope of the ages, then we are caught up
into the divine purposes of the LORD.
Thus the spiritual purpose of Moses was to ‘relate history’,
and the spiritual task of the exegete is to simply ‘adhere to the
historical account.’
Before moving on we would simply note that the
current vogue in dismissing Genesis chapters 1-3 (not to mention 4-11) as
unhistorical can only open the door once more to Origenistic
extravagence. While those committed
to an historical-grammatical hermeneutic have (almost by definition)
ruled out an allegorical interpretation, they nonetheless pass over the
literal sense in favour of a meaning grounded elsewhere. We would do well to get back to
Luther’s hermeneutic and his rebuke:
“If then we do not understand the nature of the
days or have no insight into why God wanted to make use of these
intervals of time, let us confess our lack of understanding rather than
distort the words, contrary to their context, into a foreign meaning… If
we do not comprehend the reason for this, let us remain pupils and leave
the job of teacher to the Holy Spirit.”
The meaning is in the Scriptures, not
conferred on them
Rescuing Scripture
from the Magisterium
Luther clearly stands against age-long traditions
at key points in his interpretation.
First, we will note this issue of 6-day creation:
“Therefore it is
necessary to understand these days as actual days, contrary to the
opinion of the holy fathers.
Whenever we see that the opinions of the fathers are not in
agreement with Scripture, we respectfully bear with them and acknowledge
them as our forefathers; but we do not, on their account, give up the
authority of Scripture… Human beings can err, but the Word of God is the
very wisdom of God and the absolutely infallible truth.”
He
highlights disagreement with the Vulgate on 3:1
but far more strongly on 3:15:
‘How amazing, how damnable that through the agency of foolish
exegetes Satan has managed to apply this passage, which in fullest measure
abounds in the comfort of the Son of God, to the Virgin Mary! For in all the Latin Bibles the
pronoun appears in the feminine gender: “And she will crush.” Even
Lyra, who
was not unfamiliar with the Hebrew language, is carried away by this
error as by a swollen and raging torrent.’
Luther is
unhappy in general with the interpretation of 3:15 in history:
‘[this text] should be very well known to everybody… [yet it] was
not expounded by anyone carefully and accurately so far as I know… I am
speaking of the ancient ones, who are held in esteem because of their
saintly life and their teaching.
Among these there is no one who adequately expounded this
passage.’
It is
indicative of his strong conscience and character that Luther was able to
pin so much to this interpretation of a verse which, as far as he could
tell, had not been so articulated. Yet this would not, by any means, be a
first for Luther. His revolution
on Romans 1:17 set the trend for constant conflict with the tradition and
in every case the Word was preferred to the authority of the
fathers.
In opposition to Eck at Leipzig in 1519, Luther
began to work out his convictions on the authority of the Word against
the claims of tradition. There he
proclaimed: ‘a layman who has Scripture is more than Pope or council
without it.’ The logic for this is clear – the
Church does not beget Scripture, but Scripture begets the Church. From this the doctrine of sola
Scriptura formed one of the true distinctives of Reformation
theology. Scripture alone
interprets Scripture.
While this is one of Luther’s greatest triumphs, it also opened
the door to unresolved doubt over the canon of Scripture. As Farrar notes,
Luther’s views on the canonicity of various books is uneven to say the
least. He claims that while
John’s gospel, Romans and 1st Peter are ‘the right kernel and
marrow of all books’, Jude is unnecessary, second-hand, and non-apostolic
and James is a ‘right strawy epistle’ which flatly contradicts Paul. Luther saw Job as a ‘drama in the glorification
of resignation’ and that while all the prophets built on the one
foundation (Christ), some built only with hay, and stubble!
On Genesis 3:15, Luther
allows himself to feel the force of an objection to its Gospel
content. Luther
admits that if the challenge were true then ‘Christ would be nothing,
and nothing could be proved about Christ by means of this passage.’ We must note the underlined
clause. For Luther, the integrity
of the Scriptures is guaranteed by their proclamation of Christ,
and the reality of Christ is presented to us bound within the words of
Scripture. Here are just some of Luther’s claims:
If Christ were not
proclaimed in Genesis we can infer that Luther would have considered the
book at least sub-Christian.
‘This is the
true touchstone by which all books are to be judged, when one sees
whether they urge Christ or not.’
Thus, in considering this
issue of the canon and sola Scriptura, Luther brings sola fides
and, most significantly, solus Christus into the centre where it
belongs. The meaning of the
Scriptures is in them (and not externally conferred) but
only because the meaning is Christ.
The Church cannot stand above the Bible (as happens either with
the Roman magisterium or with the modern historical critical scholars).
However it is not as though the power of authentication lies in any
inherent qualities within the Scriptures. Rather, because they ‘urge Christ’ they are
authoritative. The Bible must be
considered as witness to Christ (John 5:39) and only then does it have
the self-authenticating power which it claims for itself as God’s
Word. This leads us to…
The meaning is Christ
Rescuing the Scriptures from the Judaizers
‘Christ is the Lord, not the servant, the Lord
of the Sabbath, of law, of all things.
The Scriptures must be understood in favour of Christ, not against
Him. For that reason they must
either refer to Him or must not be held to be true Scripture.’
When Luther says ‘must’ in this quotation he is deadly
serious. The written Word is a
servant of the Eternal Word. It
is not divine revelation if it does not speak of Christ. For the exegete, diligent study of the
Scriptures will never yield the meaning, no matter how good the
hermeneutical tools. We must come
seeking the One of Whom the Scriptures speak or we find nothing of God. Thus we do not and cannot interpret
Genesis by dispassionate scholarship.
‘The Scriptures must be understood in favour of
Christ.‘
This has been the central conviction of Christian exegesis
from the Old Testament (see for e.g. Hosea 12:3-5 on the Angel), through
the New Testament (see for e.g. John 12:41 on Isaiah’s vision), through
the apologists (see for e.g. Justin Martyr in First Apology ch63)
and onwards. Distinguishing the
Church from Old Testament Israel has never been a question of adding a new,
retrospectively awarded meaning to Moses. The method modelled by Jesus and His Apostles has been to
declare the inherent Messianic proclamation of all Biblical
revelation. Luther is completely
in line with this as he repeatedly champions Genesis 3:15, not simply
here, but throughout his work.
Yet this confidence in the protevangelium has sounded
‘incautious’ and ‘unreal’ to more modern ears:
“When Luther reads the doctrines of the
Trinity, and the Incarnation, and Justification by Faith, and Reformation
dogmatics and polemics, into passages written more than a thousand years
before the Christian era… he is adopting an unreal method which had been
rejected a millennium earlier by the clearer insight and more unbiased wisdom
of the School of Antioch. As a
consequence of this method, in his commentary on Genesis he adds nothing
to Lyra except a misplaced dogmatic treatment of patriarchal history.”
Farrar misunderstands both Luther’s exegesis and
his exegetical convictions.
Luther is not claiming to read back into the text a Christological
reinterpretation. His claim is
that this Trinitarian Gospel of the LORD Messiah was preached,
understood, trusted and passed on throughout the Old Testament era. His convictions in making such a claim
are that non-Christological interpretations are really
non-interpretations. The written
Word must preach the Eternal Word or it is no word worth hearing. It just so happens that Luther, armed
with these Christological beliefs, exegetes the passage in a way that
makes most sense of the literal, historical and grammatical content of
the passage. Yet this is
secondary to his determination to proclaim Christ.
In the light of
this, it is interesting to read of the high regard with which Calvin is
often held for his ‘caution’ over Messianic interpretations.
Grant writes:
‘Not all the
reformers carried the principles of Reformation exegesis to the
conclusion which Luther reached.
John Calvin, for example, vigorously maintains an ‘objective’ type
of interpretation. For him,
scripture itself is the authority for Christian belief, rather than any
Christocentric interpretation of scripture.’
Bray has written
similarly:
“As an exegete
Calvin is noted for his scrupulous honesty; he resisted the
temptation to read Christological meanings into even such ‘obvious’
passages as Genesis 3:15.”
While Calvin’s
principles of Old Testament interpretation as laid out in the Institutes
are admirable, it is sometimes regrettable that they are not followed
through with consistency in his expositions. Lutherans in the 17th
century felt so strongly about Calvin’s Old Testament exegesis that
anathemas were pronounced, most notably by Aegidius
Hunnius, in his Calvinus Judaizans (Wittenberg,
1693). While this was an definite
over-reaction it certainly does point to differing trajectories and a
tendency in Calvin to underplay that on which Luther had so passionately
insisted.
In our own age, evangelical
scholarship is crying out for defenders of a Christian Old
Testament. Walter Kaiser writes:
“if
it [the Gospel] is not in the Old Testament text, who cares how ingenious
later writers are in their ability to reload the OT text with truths that
it never claimed or revealed in the first place? The issue is more than
hermeneutics… [the issue is that of] the authority and content of
revelation itself!” Gordon
McConville writes similarly: “the validity of a Christian understanding
of the Old Testament must depend in the last analysis on [the] cogency of
the argument that the Old Testament is messianic.”
We ought to re-learn from Luther the Christian meaning of
Moses and the Prophets. Not that,
now Moses can be read through Christian spectacles. Rather, that the only spectacles
through which Scripture can be read are Christian. The issue with our modern Jewish
friends is not about whether the New Testament is a valid addition and
re-interpretation of the Old. The
issue is the Old Testament itself.
We must maintain that the Hebrew Scriptures in and of
themselves are Christian Scripture written from faith in Christ and
directed to evoke faith in Christ.
(cf. 2 Tim 3:15-17; Acts 10:36,43). Luther would be an excellent tutor for our modern age in reclaiming
the Hebrew Scriptures for Jesus.
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